Tom Pyles

Well-Known Member
Apr 26, 2002
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Perhaps you guys could shed some light on this for me. Late yesterday afternoon (around 4pm EST), our server started acting up and became very sluggish. Most user sites were unavailable...others were loading but very slow. It became so bad that I could not access WHM...I could SSH in, but nothing else. The server had to physically be rebooted...once it came back on-line, the problem went away....Today, around 2pm EST, the server did the same thing...it took a reboot to get things back up...It was nearly impossible to even get in to reboot, but eventually I could. One of the first things I did when I was able to get the server back up check the running process. The top process was 'Top Process %CPU 85.5 gzip' I don't know if this was the cause of the problem, or this would be normal after a reboot. Anyhow, It was about 48 hours prior to this that I activated AWStats...could this be the problem or should I be looking at something else?
 

MikeMc

Well-Known Member
May 8, 2002
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Awstats is known for high resources usage and yes I have heard of servers that crashed because of it. Although I think that you can't really blame Awstats without providing more specific data.
 

Tom Pyles

Well-Known Member
Apr 26, 2002
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What kind of information should be provided. I've disabled AWStats and will be watching the server closely today to see if I have a repeat.
 

dgbaker

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PartnerNOC
Sep 20, 2002
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You said that the top process was utilizing 85.5% of CPU and it was gzip running. A couple of things to check.

1. Does you backup area still have enough space?

2. Any cronjobs set to run using gzip?

3. Any users using gzip - who owns the process?

4. If you see gzip everytime the system bogs down. Can you do a kill - 9 on the process pid? If so does performance get better after a minute or two?
 

Tom Pyles

Well-Known Member
Apr 26, 2002
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Thanks for the resonse. The back-up has plenty of space (about 7% full on that drive)

I looked through the crontabs, and found nothing using gzip...I also found nothing out of the ordinary during the time frame the server starts slowing...

That top process is running under 'root'

For what its worth, that top process is what I found in WHM as soon as I can get in, so I don't know if that is the cause of it or not....One thing to note is last night I turned off the AWStats...its now after 2pm here an everything is humming along as it should be. I'm monitoring the results of 'top' via SSH so I can get a real-time view of whats happening...right now, looks good...we'll see what happens througout the day ;)